longer on the same team. I could hear it in his voice.
'I'm sure Rhonda will be back soon,' I countered. 'She may just have gone out to have her hair done or do some shopping.'
Truthfully, neither of those two options sounded much like the Rhonda Attwood I knew, but they were the best I could come up with at a moment's notice, and Guy Owens didn't question them.
'There are decisions to make,' Guy Owens replied stiffly. 'Important decisions, and they need to be made now. This morning. So you tell me, Detective Beaumont. Why did she come to the house? What did she want?'
And suddenly all the responsibility for the future of Rhonda Attwood's single potential grandchild was thrust solely onto my shoulders. With Michelle Owens already a patient in a hospital where the lieutenant colonel's best buddy ran the show, I knew there wouldn't be any problem scheduling her for a bit of minor surgery. The innocuous diagnosis would say that some unspecified female difficulty had prompted a routine D amp; C. In the process, the embryo of Joey Rothman's posthumous progeny would be summarily scraped out of existence.
'Rhonda wanted to talk to you,' I said lamely.
'What about?'
Guy Owens wasn't making it easy for me. 'To try to talk you out of the abortion,' I replied. 'She's willing to help with the baby, financially, I mean, and with raising it too. Joey was her only son, you see, and-'
Guy Owens cut me off before I could say any more. 'That's all I wanted to know,' he said bluntly, hanging up the phone without bothering to say good-bye.
I stood there holding the handset, looking at it gloomily, listening to the empty buzz of dial tone, and knowing I'd blown it. Completely blown it! Maybe Rhonda herself could have convinced him, but I sure as hell hadn't. Feeling both powerless and inept, I flung the phone back into its cradle. Where the hell was she anyway? Why wasn't she here to handle her own damn problems?
Far away, in some other part of the house, I heard a shower turn on. It was a welcome diversion. It meant someone besides me was still hanging around. I settled down to drink a cup of coffee and to wait and see who would appear.
Ames, still bleary-eyed, stumbled into the kitchen a few minutes later. He headed straight for the coffee. 'Rhonda's still asleep?' he asked.
I shook my head. 'Up and gone already,' I told him. 'I thought you and she had taken off somewhere together.'
'Are you kidding? Not me. I just woke up a few minutes ago. Where'd she go, and how?' he asked.
'Beats me.' I shrugged, but I was beginning to feel uneasy about her absence. Walking over to the door that led out to the garage, I opened it and looked inside. Ames' enormous white Lincoln wasn't parked where we had left it.
'Did you give her permission to use your car?' I asked.
Frowning, Ames came over to where I was standing and looked out at the empty garage for himself. 'No,' he said, shaking his head. 'Not that I remember.'
He turned back into the room and checked in the cupboard drawer where he usually deposited the fistful of car keys whenever he entered the house.
'The keys are gone,' he announced.
'Stealing car keys must run in the family,' I commented humorlessly.
Ralph ignored me. 'She must have taken it, then. Are you sure she didn't leave a note somewhere telling you where she was going?'
'No. Not that I found.'
'Great,' Ralph muttered. 'That's just great. Here we are, stuck without a car, and she's off God knows where doing God knows what. We'll just have to wait for her to turn up, that's all.'
Maybe Ralph is constitutionally capable of sitting patiently and waiting for someone to 'turn up,' but I'm not. I'm terrible at waiting.
'You could always call and report the Lincoln stolen,' I suggested.
'Are you kidding? Have Rhonda Attwood arrested for car theft?' Ralph asked incredulously. 'Not on your life. She'll come back. You'll see. I'm going to go out and sit by the pool. Care to join me?'
'No thanks.'
Instead, I paced the floor for a while, trundling back and forth through the house, looking out the windows and peering up and down the street hoping to catch sight of the Lincoln as it turned in at the end of the driveway. No such luck.
Time passed. I don't know how much, but finally, when Ralph came in to pour himself another cup of coffee, I couldn't wait any longer. I picked up the phone and dialed Detective Delcia Reyes-Gonzales' direct number at the Yavapai County Sheriff's Department. It was Monday morning, and she was at her desk.
'I see you're splashed all over the front page of the Republic again this morning, Beau,' Delcia said with a musical laugh when I identified myself. 'There are only fourteen counties in this state, and so far you've raised hell in five of them. How much longer do you plan on staying around?'
'This is serious, Delcia,' I cut in. 'Rhonda's missing.'
'No!' Delcia sounded alarmed.
'I woke up around ten, and she was gone. So is Ralph Ames' car.'
'No note?'
'Nothing.'
'Any sign of a struggle?'
'No.'
'These bastards don't give up easy, do they,' Delcia breathed. She was leaping to the same uncomfortable conclusion that was beginning to dawn on me.
'Not very. What do you suggest?'
'Have you reported her missing?'
'No. Ralph didn't think it was necessary. He won't even report the car being gone. He's convinced she's just out running errands and that she'll be back.'
'He could be right,' Delcia said dubiously, 'but I'm not so sure, especially considering what all's happened in this case during the last few days. But since it is his car…'
She let the end of the sentence linger in the air. After a momentary pause she asked, 'What did those guys want, anyway? Why did they snatch Michelle? The newspaper story didn't shed much light on the whys.'
'Money, for one thing, I guess. Money Joey had lifted from somebody and turned over to Michelle for safekeeping.'
'How much money?'
'A hundred grand.'
Delcia whistled through her teeth. 'Sounds like big-time drug money to me. So maybe he wasn't lying about that after all.'
'No,' I said. 'Maybe not. And since he seems to have been grabbing at money anywhere he could find it, my guess is that he got in a tight spot with his suppliers and was trying to make good on what he owed them. Either that, or to skip out altogether.'
'Literally robbing Peter to pay Paul,' Delcia put in.
'That's right. The creeps also said something about a paper as well as the money, but all I saw in the briefcase was green stuff, so I don't have any idea what the paper could have been.'
'Maybe Michelle knows something about it,' Delcia suggested. 'The F.B.I. may have learned something from her about that. Do you know? Did they ask her?'
'They never got a chance to talk to Michelle, at least not while I was there. The chopper from Fort Huachuca had lifted off before the F.B.I. guys arrived on the scene. As far as I know, they still haven't interviewed either Guy or Michelle.'
'Is it possible that the feds learned something from the prisoners?'
'Possible,' I agreed, 'but you know the F.B.I. They didn't breathe a word to anybody else.'
'At least not to you,' Delcia interjected good-humoredly.
My temper flared. 'You're right. Not to me. You might have better luck on that score. You're a helluva lot prettier than I am, for one thing, and you're an official detective with an official connection to the case for another.
